What i'm enjoying more in new movies is seeing a lot more of the concept artists styles and raw ideas coming through the final product, and i saw a lot what i'm finding out today ways your work in Elysium last night. Which was great, btw, both the art and the movie.

Holy shit dude... this is unreal. Absolutely spectacular. The film already looked great, but with some of these designs it could've looked even better.

I wish Copley's character had the haircut that he has in this concept art instead.

I love that cloak style. Wish that was used in the film as well.

Man, some of these designs are just straight up bizarre (and I mean that in the most complimentary way possible). I kinda wish some of these other designs would've made it in. Definitely would have made the film look uniquer.

Also, I love how operator a lot of these styles are. You better be contributing to Chappie! I will be extremely disappointed if you and Pearce aren't apart of the art team for that flick. You guys are just sick.

Wow, this post is so great it makes me slightly less enthusiastic about the artbook...you need an exclusive artbook for all this amazing work...

Some of the robocops are definitely more eerie than the movie one's, the type with a faux human mask remind me of THX 1138...In fact the movie itself reminded me in many ways of Lucas' classic, especially the darkly ironic aspect of humans making robots which then oppress them.

DAAAAAAAAMN SON!!! WATCH YOUR BACK — The way you're killin' it; someone is bound to call the POLICE... and there's not enough money in the world to cover THAT bail... so if you keep this up, you're on your own. Peace.

I will be digesting this incredible material for a quite a while. But this doesn't get you off the hook for that detailed, multi-view, in-depth examination of a robot soldier you promised. And for the record, despite the brilliance of several of the robot soldier/police concepts, I still say your "Robot with Laser" concept is your best design. I say this while also taking into account that some of the robot arm designs above on this post seems to be slightly more advanced than your robot with laser design in certain specific ways. I look forward to more of your great work Aaron.

Hey, not Aaron, but a big fan of his work and a total nerd about all things science and engineering. I believe that set-up (which has ION WING written on the side) is a type of Electrohydrodynamic Propulsion. Ion-based propulsion in open air has been used in hobbyist designs for a long time. Look up ionocraft. This is basically that, but more advanced, in accordance to a paper written by MIT (Massechusets Institute of Technology), which studied the practicality of using such EHD-based ionic air propulsion technologies in a larger scale, e.g military and civilian aircrafts.

Turns out, it is actually surprisingly efficient, in fact, beating out traditional combustion and fan-based jet enginge systems. The flow of air is not due to a spinning fan, but rather an Electrohydronamic reaction. Utilizing a system of corona wire and two electrodes of different size and material, it is able to ionize air molecules by stripping electrons from atoms, and using a thing called a collector to attract the resulting ions, which are then repelled by the corona wire. These ions then react with neutral air molecules, pushing them away and producing thrust.

The efficiency of this system compared to normal jet engines is massive, however for such efficiency to be achieved, it requires a lot of distance between the electrodes, meaning the EHD Thruster has to be very large, with the MIT researchers postulating that if such a system were to be employed in a system such as an aircraft, it would need to take up its whole body to achieve such efficiencies.

Upsides out of efficiency also exist — and may be good enough that efficiency need not be a concern — in the form of radar invisibility, near-to-absolute silence, near visual invisibility, and no moving parts compared to a normal jet engine.

Aaron's design appears to be a detachable glider-style flight system that allows the ION WOLF to lift his or her entire body weight, therefore requiring the massive size. Of course, a ground-based assault unit probably wouldn't benefit from having such a massive thing on its back at all times, therefore the ability for the ION WING to fold up into a briefcase-style container; with the corona wire and collector able to easily fold up together. It's quite a clever and visually interesting design, a sentence that I would use to describe most of his work.

TL;DR Its a big glider backpack that utilizes ionocraft-based electrohydrodynamic propulsion technology for flight in open air via creating, capturing, and repelling ions in order to generate thrust via reactions with neutral air molecules. This is very efficient, — though, only when lf a sufficient size (which the ION WING definitely has... ;) ) — transparent to radar, silent, and invisible to the naked eye.

Do note that my comment probably has a few inaccuracies. I am a fan of science but not a scientist myself, so I am not likely to get everything right. It appears Aaron Beck's work predates the research done by MIT (as noted by the signature in the corners of these images), however, do check out the research for yourself, it is very interesting.

I am a cognitive scientist who is preparing a pitch for a grant application. In my pitch I would like to use one of your robot pictures. Is it okay for you if I use this picture? The picture might be visible for 20 seconds on a youtube video later on (but most likely not), if they decide to stream my pitch. Please contact me on my gmail if you have the time (michael.laakasuo[at]gmail.com)